In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Shahriar Maghami, Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master, Agile Coach at AgileToDay.org, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, A Day in the Life of an Agile Business Analyst.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: Improving traditional methods of Business Analysis and delivery, incorporating more of IIBA’s guidelines, introducing and using more dynamic and collaborative delivery methods, achieving better ROI, in the context of and through pursuing Agile methodologies.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: For the most part, the challenges have been in terms of fear of or resistance to the change, and also the budget, time, and effort required to achieve the forecasted potential benefits of the change, and establishing the agreement on benefits and profitability of implementing the change, before taking on the effort.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Focus on improving, already gained achievements and making them more robust; identifying additional areas of improvement with highest potential of enhancing ROI; increase dependability and skills of the professionals and teams involved in Agile practices.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Improvement changes are best to be applied by implementing it through more experienced unified teams, for specific projects. Demonstration of good progress and quality outcome will help increasing the momentum towards more widespread achievements, across the board.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: Improve quality, work processes, productivity, and Return on Investment.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: For method of approach, pursuing a set of criteria and processes to identify the best applicable delivery methodology for each specific project, Waterfall, or Agile. Then creating and improving business capabilities to take on suitable projects through Agile methodologies, or Waterfall, whichever, suits them best.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Focus on improvement changes that are more feasible in the organization. Identify, and work on important “quick wins”, and start with them first, particularly, the ones that can clearly demonstrate ROI improvements.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What is the one difference between a traditional and an Agile BA that stands out?

An Agile BA gathers the requirements in a much more collaborative manner from the end users, and feeds requirements to the team, in smaller and more specific manner to the team, in order to go along and support iterative delivery in Agile, and those with more immediate impact on ROI.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: If you are a BA and have done BA work, following traditional way, but you would like to pursue Agile for the projects that Agile is suitable for them, this presentation will be exactly the one to help you get started. It will cover a typical “Day in the Life of an Agile Business Analyst.”

This will cover typical processes, activities, techniques, and Agile artefacts. The main common practices of BA work in traditional space and in Agile space, and the main differences.

Also what would be common with regards to processes, techniques, and artefacts, and the main differences.

Finally, useful sample typical necessary artefacts in Agile will be presented.

The presentation can serve as a “guideline with typical necessary artefacts” for an Agile Business Analyst.

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Don’t miss Shahriar’s presentation, A Day in the Life of an Agile Business Analyst, at Building Business Capability on Friday, November 4, 2016 from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm. Click here to register for attendance.